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The scenery is whipping by too fast for Todd to see it, and it’s stressing him out. Dirk promised not to run any more red lights, but they’re still weaving through traffic with inhuman precision.
That’s what he has to be, inhuman.
It’s not that big of a shock that sometime in the last twenty years, someone picked up where his own manufacturers left off. Todd might have been a conceptual and commercial failure even before he broke down, but the technology was sound. It’s probably more surprising that the world hasn’t been overrun with robots yet.
Maybe it has, and Todd just hasn’t noticed. He’s stayed undercover for a good 15 years at this point, who’s to say no one else has done the same? In that case, Dirk isn’t necessarily the first robot he’s met, he’s just the least subtle.
Well, apart from that creep at the Perriman Grand, but Todd’s trying not to think about that whole situation.
Dirk pulls an improbable u-turn, swinging around some yellow obstacle — a banana? A construction worker? A school bus? — in a perfect circle.
“Stop, just stop, you’re going to ruin everything,” Todd creaks, the gears in his fingers grinding as he tries to grip the seat tighter. He’d love to say he’s complaining out of solidarity with the droves of theoretical robots just trying to make a life under the radar, but honestly, fuck them so long as he doesn’t get pulled over an hour outside Seattle when he isn’t meant to leave town because he’s the prime suspect in a murder probably committed by his asshole doppelgänger.
He can’t even afford to turn the guy in because then the cops will know he’s not human and send him to the dump where he’ll be crushed in a trash compactor and Amanda will find out and despise him.
That’s assuming those detectives haven’t already picked up on the fact that he doesn’t legally exist and has been working and renting under the table and then broke the law some more by stealing his rent back from Dorian because he feels guilty for lying to his sister about literally everything all the time.
Fuck, so much for not thinking about his problems.
Dirk says something, but trying to pick out the syllables of his unfamiliar accent from the swearing of other drivers from the music still blasting in his face is next to impossible, and lip reading can only get him so far when Dirk is stuffing his face with pizza.
Why would the CIA make a robot that can eat pizza? Maybe Dirk is just some regular asshole with poor social skills and hair that looks plastic.
—
Dirk knows.
Todd knows that Dirk knows, because Dirk knows that Todd knows.
This ugly American flag tank top is a warning.
I know about the other robot at the hotel. Shut up about your stupid drawing of a cowboy.
Todd puts it on. It shows off his weird hairless arms, but Dirk’s the only one who’ll see, so it’s fine. It feels almost good.
Okay. I won’t tell if you don’t.
They dig for hours. They lie awake in the jeep. They talk about nothing, and pet the cat Dirk snuck along, and dig some more.
Todd’s never been a fan of the great outdoors. It’s impossible to navigate when everything is the same mush of green and brown, and the replacement gyroscope in his hips is struggling with the uneven ground. When he arrived in Seattle, he swore he’d never go anywhere without a bus route ever again.
There’s something about this treasure hunt, though. It’s so separate from his normal life, but it’s better, it’s more real.
It helps that Dirk has clearly never seen a shovel in his life, let alone used one. He’s stronger and more flexible than Todd, but that’s working against him now. He keeps driving the shovel in too deep and then flopping around wildly as he tries to pull it back out. He found a worm earlier and spent twenty minutes panicking about it.
He’s a disaster.
He chose to be a person and make his own decisions and promptly fucked it up.
He’s just like Todd, and that’s such a relief.
They don’t even need to talk about it, but he does, because he can.
“I’ve never met someone like me before,” he says, backtracking to the car because they misread the map again.
“What, really? You must not get out much,” Dirk says, and Todd just laughs.
Todd tells him about Amanda.
Dirk tells him about Blackwing.
The kitten has a shark inside it, and they kill some guys, but they found the machine, they’re solving the murder, and they’re going to save Lydia Spring.
Maybe taking control of his life was a good thing after all.
—
He stops talking. She’s looking at him.
He can’t figure out what that look on her face means.
She says, “listen, I know things have been, like, crazy the past couple days…”
It’s Amanda, he always knows what her expressions mean. She learned them from him.
“I mean, if you asked me last week, I’d’ve said…”
It processes. He has to cross-reference from other people, but he figures it out.
“Freaking sci-fi bull…”
She’s worried. She’s a little bit afraid. She’s pretending she isn’t.
“No fucking way, man, like…”
She doesn’t believe him.
“I mean obviously it is, right, but like…”
He jams his stupid, stubby fingers into the seam of his elbow and peels the skin down his arm.
Amanda chokes, caught halfway between a gasp and a scream.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry, that was too much, you’re right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he babbles, caught between trying to comfort her and trying to fix it, the loose rubber glove flopping around wildly. She flinches away when he goes for a hug, still coughing, tears streaming down her face. It keeps slipping down his arm, and now his metal fingers are scrabbling awkwardly within the palm, bulging horribly as he shoves his ring and middle finger into the rubber pinky. He’s suddenly reminded of the struggles of dressing a squirming young Amanda for warmth in the winter.
“Fuck it,” he says, and chucks the thing across the room. It smacks into a window and lands limply on one of the many piles of crap he still hasn’t dealt with.
He fills an unbroken plastic cup with water and sets it on the counter in front of her, rubbing her back with his normal hand.
She sips at it and takes a couple shuddering breaths.
“What,” she says, wetly, “the fuck.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
—
The clock strikes 4, and the students pack their bags and straggle out of the room, talking blithely about homework and weekend plans. The TA takes her time clearing the whiteboard, then sits down heavily. She flicks through the papers she collected at the start of class and sighs.
“Are you okay?” asks Todd.
She startles.
“Shit! Ah, forgot you were there. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“Do you need me to do anything?” says Todd.
“No, no, just sit still while I unplug these cords.”
Todd complies. There’s not much else to do.
The TA works in silence, and Todd wonders what Amanda is up to. On a normal day he would have walked her home from school at 3:00 and made her a snack, then played games or watched television until 4:30, homework time. Lately she had been adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers. The Brotzmans would get home from work at 5:30, at which point he would make dinner while Amanda practiced piano.
At this time last week, on his last normal day, Amanda climbed the pine tree in the backyard. In hindsight, he should not have let her do that. The benefits of physical activity and time in nature on child development are irrelevant if the child in question breaks her neck. With that in mind, he definitely should not have followed her up into the tree. He could have engaged her in collaborative imaginative play perfectly well on the ground, so there was very little potential benefit for Amanda, and Todd is not a child.
She has been experimenting with independence, though she prefers company. Todd prefers to accompany her, which had been working out well before. Now, there is a decent possibility Amanda is up in the tree, alone.
Todd decides to believe that Amanda is safe on the couch in the den, playing the next level of Crash Bandicoot. If she dies there, she can always restart the level.
The TA must be finished disconnecting him from the computer, because she suddenly picks Todd up under the armpits and carries him to the storage closet.
She grunts, struggling to open the door while holding Todd.
“Can I help?” he asks.
“Yeah,” says the TA, “Can you open the door? I don’t know how dexterous you are.”
“I can,” Todd says. It takes a moment to adjust his grip on the handle, flexing his fingers to map out the unusual shape, but then he’s rotating his wrist and pulling the door open. He hadn’t had time to grab the branch.
“Nifty,” says the TA. “Once we get your legs reattached you can do this bit yourself.”
‘Thank you’ seems like an inappropriate response here, as does ‘you’re welcome’, so Todd stays quiet as the TA sets him on the floor. It doesn’t seem to bother her, and she shuts the light off and locks the door without another word.
In the dark, there’s not enough visual contrast for Todd to interpret his surroundings. He settles in for a long night.
At 4:47 his internal phone rings. He picks up, ready with ‘Hello, Brotzman residence, may I ask who’s calling?’ but that’s not right, so he chokes out “Hello?”
“Todd?”
It’s Amanda.
“Hi,” he says, redundantly. “How are you?”
“When are you coming home?” she asks.
“Oh, well…”
He doesn’t know how to answer. Is it better to tell the truth and hurt her now, or lie and hurt her later?
“Why did you leave?”
She didn’t give him enough time to decide, and now he’s tripping over the change in topic.
“I - I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t come home,” Amanda says, accusingly. “Mom says you went to college, but you fell and you didn’t come home and I thought you died.”
Amanda never takes time to think, she wants to do everything right now, so Todd does what she wants.
“No, I’m uh- I’m alive,” Todd says. “I’m alive.”
He doesn’t think about it.
“Are you okay? Did you go to the hospital?”
“No, I’m fine. I didn’t go to the hospital.”
“Why are you at college?”
“Uh, for learning.”
“Why?”
“Well, Mom and Dad thought it was a good idea.”
“They’re wrong.”
“Amanda.”
“When are you coming home? I miss you.”
“It’s. It’s probably going to be a while.”
“How much of a while?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll come home as soon as I can, Amanda.”
“Will you be home tomorrow?”
“Ah, no. Longer than that.”
“The day after tomorrow?”
“Longer.”
“The day after the day after tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. I want to come home soon, but I need to stay here.”
“Why?”
“I’m supposed to.”
“Why?”
“Mom and Dad told me to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Why do you wanna know?”
“I miss you. Nobody tells me anything.”
“Do they know you’re calling me right now?”
A pause.
“Amanda?”
“They wouldn’t tell me anything, I had to! And I didn’t know what to do, but you wrote your phone number in my backpack. Please don’t tell on me.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m sorry. I just missed you. I thought you died.”
“I’m okay. I’m sorry too, Amanda. I miss you so much.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Amanda.”
“Can I call you ‘til you come home? I know I’m not supposed to.”
“Okay. It’s okay, you can call me. My classes end at 4 o’clock. You can call me then.”
“Every day?”
“If you want to.”
“I miss you.”
“I know, Amanda. I miss you too.”
“I want you to come home now.”
“Me too.”
—
Just when Todd has accepted she’ll never look at him again, Amanda stomps back out of the bathroom.
“But, you can’t be a robot! That makes no sense! You have fucking baby pictures!”
“I— what? No I don’t.”
“You do. I stole ‘em out of the album when I was like twelve, ‘cause I realized there weren’t any other pictures of you in the house.”
He squints at her, confused. There can’t be any baby pictures, he was literally never a baby.
“Here, I have them on my phone,” she says, and flicks through dozens of niche memes about city planning and The Lord of the Rings she tries to hide and he pretends not to see.
She snickers, and he looks over to see the caption “why would you put a water treatment plant — there” over an image of a building badly photoshopped into a booth at a Chuck E. Cheese.
“Oh my god.”
She bats him away, but starts scrolling faster. Finally, she turns the phone to face him.
“Look, see? There’s you.”
He looks at the picture. A fat baby slumps in a plastic high chair, looking drunk and smug. Its face is covered in yogurt.
“That’s you,” he says.
“No, it’s you.” She zooms in. “Look at your dumb little face.”
“That’s how I know it’s you,” he says.
“Fuck off.” She flicks to the next one. It’s clearly Amanda, maybe three months old, hair standing on end and deeply confused.
“That’s you again.”
“No! Look — look at your eyes. They’re blue.”
“Yeah?”
“My eyes are brown, dipshit.”
“You know babies’ eyes change color, right? Like, they’re mostly born with blue eyes but change color over the first few months as they’re exposed to light.”
Amanda boggles.
“They fucking what?”
“Yeah, I mean, why do you think people talk about ‘baby blues’?”
“You’re fucking with me. You’re just making shit up.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I dunno, so I’ll believe your bonkers robot story!”
“You literally saw-! No, fine, say I’m faking it. What reason would I possibly have to pretend to be a robot?”
“I have no fucking clue! But it makes more sense than freaking shapeshifting babies!”
“Oh my god, it’s a real thing, Amanda, just look it up.”
“Fine, but I’m gonna prove you so wrong, and then where will we be?”
Where would we be? Todd thinks. Is there any possibility Amanda’s right, and I’m just having some sort of break with reality?
He pinches himself. He doesn’t feel anything. All the pressure sensors are in his metal skeleton, after all, his skin is just decorative.
“Well, shit,” Amanda says.
He smirks at her, triumphant and a little petty.
“This doesn’t fucking prove anything though.” She shoves her phone in his face, this time displaying a half-naked baby angrily chewing on its own foot. “Just ‘cause this could be me doesn’t mean it isn’t you.”
“I literally took all these pictures, Amanda. I know for a fact that it’s you.”
She takes the phone back, scrolling rapidly and scowling at him.
“Aha! What do you have to say to this?” she says. “If that’s me, why would our parents put me in boy clothes?”
The ‘boy clothes’ in question are blue corduroy overalls.
“You didn’t wear pink all the time, you would have rioted, even then. You systematically puked on every dress you owned. Besides,” he says.
Someone is knelt behind the baby, holding its hands, which allows it to stand awkwardly. The baby is beaming up at them, but the picture cuts off just below the shoulders.
“That’s me holding you.”
He smiles at the baby in the picture. Maybe she’ll turn and wave.
Beside him, Amanda has gone gray.
—
Todd has barely had a chance to process the time loop bullshit when the door opens and then Dirk is on the floor with a wire connecting him to the bald guys.
He yanks it out because fuck those guys and whatever they’re trying to do, and then the world fritzes.
Things start happening again. He registers sound and movement nearby, which coalesces into frantic whispering.
Todd is standing beside a tree — no, a fence — no, a — light is flickering. He should change the bulb, check the wires for electrical damage — sledgehammer damage — earthquake damage, which is a fire hazard, inside a maze under — his house, there’s a dead body — holding an underwire bra — hostage as a dog —
“Todd?”
He turns his head left and down toward the noise, or he intends to. It takes a moment for his neck to actually obey the command.
“Todd? Are you … awake now?”
“Dirk?” he says, the sound slowly welling up within him as if from a long way away. Dirk is staring at him. Did he forget to move his mouth?
“Are you okay?” Dirk asks, delicately. This hesitance is uncharacteristic of him. Todd attempts to catalog his facial expression. He looks — sad? No, resigned. Tired. Hurt?
He follows that train of thought down to Dirk’s shoulder, which is the wrong color. No, it’s the right color, but the red is on top of it, slipping down it, leaking out of it.
If he was Amanda, that would mean he’s bleeding. But Dirk is not Amanda, he’s just like Todd. But Todd doesn’t leak.
“Wh- why- why are you bleeding?” he asks, speech hiccuping uncomfortably in his throat.
“Well, you see, I have an arrow in my shoulder,” Dirk replies.
“But why- do you. Have blood?”
“Am I not supposed to…?”
That detective comes in, Estevez, the one who can’t raise his eyebrows, herding two dogs, no one dog and one girl — Amanda? No, Lydia Spring. He’s holding a gun in one hand and rubbing his face with the other as she barks at the broken machine.
Todd can’t quite make out what he’s saying, just a jumble of “okay”s and “it’s gonna be alright”s. That’s moderately reassuring.
Dirk mutters something, and then Estevez turns around.
“Oh shit! He was dead! Wasn’t he just dead?”
He’s shaking the gun at Todd.
“Yes, that’s what we thought, but then he got up and did the Macarena.”
This makes Estevez look very tired. He uses the gun to scratch at his temple, which seems dangerous.
“Be careful,” says Todd.
“Shut up!” he cries, and then Farah grabs him.
—
“I still find it hard to believe you’re a robot. I know you are, you’ve shown me, but you’re just so… um…” Farah trails off, stirring her milkshake.
“Lifelike?” Todd suggests.
“No, uh, the word I was thinking was ‘messy’, but that’s a little rude.”
“Oh. Yeah.” That’s fair enough, to be honest.
“And-and why do you look like that?”
“Like…? I don’t know what you mean.” Does he look weird? Does Dirk think he looks weird? He looks at him for help, but Dirk just shrugs.
“No, I mean, the uh,” she gestures vaguely to his entire face. “Beard?”
“Oh!” he says, ghosting a hand over his masterpiece. “I did that myself.” Once he cut off the floppy, nineties, boy-next-door, teen heartthrob look, he’d had a lot of spare hair. With just a needle, some glue, and a DVD extra behind the scenes at Weta Workshop, he looked a good fifteen years older. “It’s like, a disguise. Do you like it?”
She bites her lip. “Um. No.”
Dirk pretends to look at something out the window. What a dick.
“Oh, actually! Do you know what I was wondering?” Dirk interrupts. Thank god. “What, if anything, did you actually do to Amanda, besides be a robot? I’ve actually no clue why you felt so guilty.”
The atmosphere becomes infinitely more awkward.
“Oh, well, I uh – when they were getting rid of me, um, Amanda’s parents, they told me to erase all of their, like, personal data? I used to buy groceries and pay utilities and stuff, so I knew all their bank account information, credit cards, et cetera. But I didn’t want to forget everything, so I just … didn’t. And then later, after I ran away, I realized they hadn’t changed any of their passwords and so I stole, uh, all of their savings. So, when Amanda got sick, they couldn’t pay for treatment. She didn’t even want them to, though, ‘cause she thought they disowned me, so they haven’t really spoken in years. I am, or was, the only person in her life, but I’m not really … uh. So, yeah.”
He slides his fingers over the condensation on his ginger ale. He can’t drink it, but he ordered it anyway because Amanda always hated it when he bought takeout and didn’t get anything for himself. He feels distinctly fake, staring at his dull plastic fingernails. It’s a waste of money. It’s a waste of food. When he thinks of all the crap he bought over the years, mugs and records and blankets cluttering up an apartment just so he could play pretend, he feels like the worst kind of monster. For years, he felt all those stupid possessions clinging to him, clogging up his servos, but seeing it all destroyed didn’t fix it. It just felt worse. Everything he owned, everything he was, just gone. Like he was nothing.
Nothing, except Amanda’s, and now he’s not even that.
“Todd?”
Farah looks worried. She shouldn’t have to worry about him, that’s stupid. He’s just a dishwasher with a face.
Dirk gently peels his hand off the ginger ale, and doesn’t let go. Todd flexes his fingers. Dirk’s hand is soft. He can feel bundles of muscle in his palm, and a row of long thin bones ending in knobbly knuckles. There are veins twined around them, just visible under his pale skin, and a scattering of fine, fair hair blooming up from his wrist.
He wraps his hand around Dirk’s. Dirk squeezes back.
